Show HN: My dad is a forensic accountant. I automated ~62% of his job
39 by mstalcup | 15 comments on Hacker News.
39 by mstalcup | 15 comments on Hacker News.
Friday, May 22, 2026
Thursday, May 21, 2026
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps
Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps
59 by sanity | 10 comments on Hacker News.
For the past 5 years or so I've been working on a ground-up redesign of Freenet, my peer-to-peer project from the early 2000s (now renamed Hyphanet). The new Freenet has been up and running since December along with some early applications like River[1], our decentralized group chat and Delta - a decentralized CMS. Users have already started to build their own apps on Freenet including games, and we have some interesting apps in development like Atlas, a search/recommendation engine. Architecturally, this new Freenet is a global, decentralized key-value store where keys are webassembly contracts which define what values (aka "state") are valid for that key, how or when the values can be mutated, and how the state can be efficiently synchronized between peers. We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result. This approach allows state updates to spread through the network like a virus[2], which typically achieves consistent global state in a few seconds or less. Like the world wide web, Freenet applications can be downloaded from the network itself and run in a web browser - similar to single-page apps on the normal web. However, rather than connecting back to an API running in a datacenter, the webapp connects locally to the Freenet peer and interacts with Freenet contracts and delegates over a local websocket connection. If you'd like to try Freenet we have convenient installers for the major desktop OSs but not yet mobile, and you can be chatting with other users on River within seconds[3]. Happy to answer any questions, you're also welcome to read our FAQ[4], or watch a talk I gave back in March[5]. [1] https://ift.tt/Dxhw3fl [2] https://ift.tt/DdkusH3 [3] https://ift.tt/CyhKRqX [4] https://ift.tt/F1nPT2D [5] https://youtu.be/3SxNBz1VTE0
59 by sanity | 10 comments on Hacker News.
For the past 5 years or so I've been working on a ground-up redesign of Freenet, my peer-to-peer project from the early 2000s (now renamed Hyphanet). The new Freenet has been up and running since December along with some early applications like River[1], our decentralized group chat and Delta - a decentralized CMS. Users have already started to build their own apps on Freenet including games, and we have some interesting apps in development like Atlas, a search/recommendation engine. Architecturally, this new Freenet is a global, decentralized key-value store where keys are webassembly contracts which define what values (aka "state") are valid for that key, how or when the values can be mutated, and how the state can be efficiently synchronized between peers. We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result. This approach allows state updates to spread through the network like a virus[2], which typically achieves consistent global state in a few seconds or less. Like the world wide web, Freenet applications can be downloaded from the network itself and run in a web browser - similar to single-page apps on the normal web. However, rather than connecting back to an API running in a datacenter, the webapp connects locally to the Freenet peer and interacts with Freenet contracts and delegates over a local websocket connection. If you'd like to try Freenet we have convenient installers for the major desktop OSs but not yet mobile, and you can be chatting with other users on River within seconds[3]. Happy to answer any questions, you're also welcome to read our FAQ[4], or watch a talk I gave back in March[5]. [1] https://ift.tt/Dxhw3fl [2] https://ift.tt/DdkusH3 [3] https://ift.tt/CyhKRqX [4] https://ift.tt/F1nPT2D [5] https://youtu.be/3SxNBz1VTE0
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP
Show HN: Agent.email – sign up via curl, claim with a human OTP
16 by adisingh13 | 5 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We're Haakam, Michael, and Adi from AgentMail- a ycs25 company. We give AI agents their own email inboxes. Recently, we ran an experiment called Agent.Email. It's a signup flow designed specifically for AI agents instead of humans. The inspiration came from a few comments we received when we did our seed launch a few months back. They all came from the very apt observation that agents not being able to sign up to a product made for agents without human credentials was ironic and unideal. This is basically the thesis we built AgentMail on: The internet was made for humans exclusively, designed to keep machines out by default. Every signup flow assumes a browser, a person reading a page, and clicking a confirmation link. Unless agents can't do that, they can't be first class users of the internet. Agents can now get an email inbox by themselves. (This also means a lot of email nobody wants to read gets processed by AI instead of your inbox being cluttered with spam and slop) Here's how agent.email works. Agent needs an inbox and hits AgentMail via curl. Agent receives instructions via MD unless the request comes from a browser, in which case we use HTML. Agent decides agent.email is useful and then hits the sign-up endpoint with its human email as a parameter. Agent receives a restricted inbox with credentials. Agent emails the human asking for an OTP. Human replies with the code, and the agent is claimed and restrictions are lifted. Until claimed, the agent can only email its own human and nobody else. Ten emails a day, and the signup endpoint is rate-limited hard by IP. Right now it's a 1:1 mapping between agent and human. The next step is many-to-one, because one person running several agents in parallel is already very common. Building agent.email also pushed us to revisit places in AgentMail where the default assumptions were built around the primary user being human. For example, the CLI outputs in a single column with consistent formatting because mixed delimiters are easy for a person to scan, but harder for an agent reasoning about structure. We also shortened messageIDs after agents started hallucinating completions on longer ones. A few things we'd like the community's take on: is restricted-until-claimed the right trust model? Does agent self-signup feel useful in production, or is it mostly a novelty, and if it's a novelty now, what would make it actually useful? Should agent onboarding require human approval by default, or should some agents be able to fully self-provision? What do you think are some additional measures we can take for secure sign-ups?
16 by adisingh13 | 5 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We're Haakam, Michael, and Adi from AgentMail- a ycs25 company. We give AI agents their own email inboxes. Recently, we ran an experiment called Agent.Email. It's a signup flow designed specifically for AI agents instead of humans. The inspiration came from a few comments we received when we did our seed launch a few months back. They all came from the very apt observation that agents not being able to sign up to a product made for agents without human credentials was ironic and unideal. This is basically the thesis we built AgentMail on: The internet was made for humans exclusively, designed to keep machines out by default. Every signup flow assumes a browser, a person reading a page, and clicking a confirmation link. Unless agents can't do that, they can't be first class users of the internet. Agents can now get an email inbox by themselves. (This also means a lot of email nobody wants to read gets processed by AI instead of your inbox being cluttered with spam and slop) Here's how agent.email works. Agent needs an inbox and hits AgentMail via curl. Agent receives instructions via MD unless the request comes from a browser, in which case we use HTML. Agent decides agent.email is useful and then hits the sign-up endpoint with its human email as a parameter. Agent receives a restricted inbox with credentials. Agent emails the human asking for an OTP. Human replies with the code, and the agent is claimed and restrictions are lifted. Until claimed, the agent can only email its own human and nobody else. Ten emails a day, and the signup endpoint is rate-limited hard by IP. Right now it's a 1:1 mapping between agent and human. The next step is many-to-one, because one person running several agents in parallel is already very common. Building agent.email also pushed us to revisit places in AgentMail where the default assumptions were built around the primary user being human. For example, the CLI outputs in a single column with consistent formatting because mixed delimiters are easy for a person to scan, but harder for an agent reasoning about structure. We also shortened messageIDs after agents started hallucinating completions on longer ones. A few things we'd like the community's take on: is restricted-until-claimed the right trust model? Does agent self-signup feel useful in production, or is it mostly a novelty, and if it's a novelty now, what would make it actually useful? Should agent onboarding require human approval by default, or should some agents be able to fully self-provision? What do you think are some additional measures we can take for secure sign-ups?